Across the nation

Posted: February 14, 2012 - 1:04am

WASHINGTON

In an abrupt about-face, House GOP leaders announced Monday that they are willing to extend the two percentage point cut in the payroll tax through the end of the year and add the approximately $100 billion cost to the nation’s $15 trillion-plus debt.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy of California said the House could vote on the payroll tax measure this week, but that the fate of unemployment benefits for millions of the long-term jobless and efforts to forestall a scheduled cuts in fees to doctors who treat Medicare patients would remain in the hands of a House-Senate negotiating panel that’s looking for ways to pay for them.

The GOP statement came after intense talks this weekend failed to produce an agreement. Republicans were pressing for pay cuts for federal workers and requiring them to contribute more to their pensions. They recoiled at a Democratic proposal to raise Transportation Security Administration per-ticket airline security fees.

WASHINGTON

The White House said Monday legislation in the Senate that would give employers broad leeway to restrict coverage for contraception is “dangerous and wrong.”

Press secretary Jay Carney took aim at legislation by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. — a possible GOP vice presidential candidate — and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., that would allow any employer to deny birth control coverage if it runs counter to their religious or moral beliefs.

Another bill, by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., would go even further by allowing health plans to deny coverage for any service that violates their beliefs.

DETROIT

Displaying guns, vests and other military gear, a prosecutor told jurors Monday that members of a Midwest militia were willing “to go to war” in an extraordinary plot to kill a police officer as a springboard to a broader rebellion against the U.S. government.

Some of the evidence was placed directly in front of the jury box as trial opened for seven members of a group called Hutaree, who are charged with conspiring to commit sedition as well as weapons crimes.

Still, defense attorneys dismissed any talk by the defendants as little more than fantasy and equated the group more to a “social club” than a militia.

RALEIGH, N.C.

A student who had to pull her bra away from her body so school officials could check whether she was hiding drugs must have been humiliated and frightened by the unreasonable search, her lawyer told the North Carolina Supreme Court on Monday. An attorney for the state argued the search was minimally invasive.

The state’s high court heard oral arguments in the case involving a student known only as T.A.S — unidentified in court because she was 15 years old when the “bra-lift search” occurred at the Brunswick County Academy in 2008. The justices will decide whether the search violated the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches.

“It is unconstitutional for our daughters to be treated this way by the public schools of North Carolina,” attorney Geeta Kapur told the state’s highest court.